


choose not the silence

by orphan_account



Series: hqlog [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aoba Jousai Kageyama, M/M, Mental Illness, Multi, Parental Abuse, Polyamory, Relationship Negotiation, Repression, discussion of polyamory, repost from old account
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 16:04:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21430939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: this is the direct sequel to The Song My Bluebird Sings.--thank you for reading!
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Kunimi Akira, Hanamaki Takahiro/Matsukawa Issei, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru, Kageyama Tobio/Kindaichi Yuutarou/Kunimi Akira, background Akaashi Keiji/Kuroo Tetsurou/Bokuto Koutarou
Series: hqlog [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1541977
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is the direct sequel to The Song My Bluebird Sings. 
> 
> -  
-
> 
> thank you for reading!

A more inauspicious first meeting? Not possible.  
  
Kageyama remembers with migraine-inducing clarity the first time Kindaichi reached for his hand. It was not, he reckons, the first time: they’d met before, in a distant dreamworld, in shared nightmares. Violence cemented bonds.   
  
His mother hitting him brought him the two boys whom he cannot separate from the distant unraveling of his life, no matter his efforts. Not that I’m thanking you; I’m thanking them.   
  
“What’s this about,” he says, for once preferring to stare at a shorn-off space on the glaring white wall surrounding the storage closet. Anywhere but in Kindaichi’s eyes.   
  
When he’d proposed they start over, he hadn’t thought they’d meet in Aoba Jousai’s maintenance tool shed during an ebb in their volleyball practice. And he hadn’t imagined Kindaichi on his own, in startling bright shorts and a bright white jersey, now suspiciously rumpled.   
  
Scowling, Kindaichi says, “_Tobio_.”   
  
That voice, brooking no room for an intervention. Kageyama’s heart seizes. How he’s missed it.   
  
“How am I fucking talking to you?” Kindaichi briefly lowers his gaze, as though acknowledging he’s half-heartedly expecting a retort. “I’m pretty pissed at myself. Pissed and also gobsmacked.”   
  
_This isn’t really about you, though_. More than the three of them, it had been an exploration of their resilience in living with a violence none of them deserved. Certainly not Kageyama.   
  
He says, “Why did you meet me, then.”   
  
This time, he threatens himself with bolting if he can’t meet Kindaichi’s eyes.   
  
Kunimi couldn’t make it because of some dumb chem study group. He would’ve levied this, held them up and over the surging rapids of their desperation for an understanding.   
  
Except Kindaichi already understands the cause of their perpetual miscommunication: Kageyama doesn’t need a healer.   
  
Choosing to ignore it means everyone gets what they want, but it’s a fucking privilege.   
  
It’s a mistake, Kageyama chides himself, to meet his eyes.   
  
They’re crucified against the wall on nails of their own making in seconds. It’s as if their kiss has gone on, uninterrupted, for months in a universe distantly existing alongside their own. They’d never gone about it the messy way. Their kisses had soon bored them with the ruins of their mouths already looted. But the thought of foregoing it altogether and venturing onto uncharted land defied all realm of possibility. Not without Kunimi.   
  
“Fuck Akira,” Kageyama says, his back digging into a hammered steel shelf. Smiling hard enough to slice through glass, Kindaichi swallows him down, snaring his tongue in a razor wire net of offensive hunger.   
  
“Bullshit.”   
  
Swiping his lips across the serrated edge of the shelf, Kageyama winces. Breathing in hollow gushes, Kindaichi stills his hand over an industrial drill.   
  
“Fucking transfer, Tobio.”   
  
“Is that a threat.”   
  
Kindaichi smirks. “That what you want?”   
  
Maybe not a premonition of pain, pain of the physical kind, but his wrist vibrates with the ceaseless want of his heart.   
  
“I need you to hurt me,” he says. Kindaichi snarls into his open mouth, crinkling the stuffy black fabric of his gakuran in his sweating palms.   
  
A muffled knock sets their hearts back a full beat. “What the hell are you getting up to in there, Yuutarou.”   
  
The both of them sigh, their collective misery enough to conjure the vision of their own personal storm cloud over their heads, pelting them with shards of betrayal.   
  
“It’s me, Iwa,” Kageyama says, cringing with the effort of forcing the words out.   
  
Pinning the door open with one bare arm, Iwaizumi blinks slowly at the disquieting tableau, his frown easing into a complicated wriggle Kageyama cannot begin to interpret. On him, the Aoba Jousai uniform radiates a supreme power.   
  
“You can’t hightail it without at least playing one round with us,” he says.   
  
_ I’m finalizing my transfer tonight_.   
  
“Akira’s absent anyway.” Scratching his neck with an absent hand, Iwaizumi raises one dark brow. “Short a player.”   
  
_ Say the word. Say the goddamn words or so help me. _   
  


Rolling his eyes, Kindaichi enunciates each word with cutting precision. “Fucking don’t go, okay.”   
  
Shredding his teeth across his bottom lip, his smile so wide his mouth aches, Kageyama traps Kindaichi in an affectionate headlock before Iwaizumi nabs him with a swift smack on the ass.   
  
_ I’m home. _


	2. Chapter 2

  
They walk to Kunimi’s apartment after the rushed scrimmage. Tooru had responded in the way Kageyama had figured he would, with a snide smirk and a cutthroat threat that if he didn’t transfer by next week, he could say goodbye to the world he’d thought he’d loved.   
  
He savors the warmth of Kindaichi’s arm over his shoulder as he says, “I like myself more than I like my mother. I’m my own mom now, if that makes any sense.”   
  
Kindaichi says, “It does,” and swears under his breath, his dark tennis shoes skidding on the pavement.   
  
Phone in hand, Kunimi scowls at them in turn. “When did you decide to break someone else’s heart, Tobio?”   
  
A suckerpunch to the gut, the words broil through him on spitting flames. His legs buckling, Kageyama shuts his eyes on burning tears.   
  
“Don’t think,” Kunimi says, glowering, “for one fucking second that I’m the good cop here. Yuutarou can have that role.”   
  
“Hey, man.” At Kindaichi’s protest, Kunimi shakes his head with a violent energy.   
  
“We’re going to talk. You’re trapped till we’re done here.” His gaze fixes on Kindaichi, spiraling into livid whirlpools of something Kageyama can’t define. The words, he decides, belatedly, are meant for him. “Am I understood,” Kunimi says, turning to him.   
  
“Yes.” Swiping beads of tears from his eyes, Kageyama nods, once. Kunimi shoves his phone in the open pocket of his aquamarine blazer.   
  
“Perfect.”   
  
\-   
  
They peel leftover okonomiyaki off of crinkled foil sheets laid out on the kitchen counter. It’s not good to eat standing up, Kageyama remembers, but at this point he’s beyond caring about his digestive tract.   
  
“What the everloving fuck compelled you to ditch your friends,” Kunimi says, “and come back to us?”   
  
Kageyama doesn’t miss a beat. “You did.”   
  
“Uh huh.” Kunimi gives him a familiar look, the one that used to irk him with its influence over what the world deemed as foolish miscalculations. His mouth quirks in an unforgiving smile. “_I_ fucking didn’t.”   
  
“Okay,” Kindaichi says, midway through swallowing, “I’m partially to blame.”   
  
Kunimi rolls his eyes so hard, Kageyama winces on his behalf. “Why. He could’ve come back in a way that didn’t fuck his friends over. Why do you always need a fucking power boost like you’re a character in a fucking video game.”   
  
“You swear more when you’re angry,” Kageyama says, chewing slowly. Kunimi’s smile cuts through to bone.   
  
“I don’t fucking understand how you can abandon your best friends and essentially recover in a day. Is volleyball that meaningless to you?”   
  
Kindaichi smirks. “Ask yourself that one, Akira.”   
  
“Okay, shut the fuck up.” Slamming his can of instant coffee on the counter, Kunimi breathes through clenched teeth. “I admit it, volleyball’s not my number one priority right now. But am I hurting my friends over it?”   
  
Kindaichi shrugs. “Guess you gotta ask them.”   
  
“Fuck you.”   
  
Sliding himself between them, Kageyama curves his spine into the brutal slant of the counter and says, “The team missed you today. Even with me helping out, they needed you. Maybe volleyball should actually be your number one priority right now.”   
  
“Maybe,” Kunimi says, biting out the words, “I shouldn’t take advice from an asshole who gave his best buds the finger for no fucking reason.”   
  
“Do you want this?” Kindaichi says.   
  
The heaviness in his voice drowns out the muted sounds of life around them: the refrigerator’s humming, the descending wail of sirens outside the open window, pale blue curtains shifting beneath the cool touch of a breeze.   
  
“That you’d even consider asking such a dumb fucking question.” Sighing, Kunimi snares his hand across Kageyama’s back. “Of course I want this, Yuutarou.”   
  
“You didn’t want me leaving Karasuno,” Kageyama says, his voice ringing out in a hollow drone. “Over us.”   
  
Kunimi’s eyes flare with a careful magic. His smile comes slowly. “I figured you understood that much.”   
  
Kageyama doesn’t stop himself from crushing Kunimi in his arms and kissing him as though his livelihood depends on it. Kindaichi fluidly disentangles himself from Kunimi’s hand, smiling with a profound pleasure as he stares at an incoming message on his phone.   
  
“Oh, fuck,” he says, reading through it again.   
  
Kunimi blinks the bleary onset of confusion from his eyes, separating himself from Kageyama’s waiting lips. “What’s up.”   
  
Kindaichi passes him the phone over Kageyama’s shoulder, pointedly avoiding their searching eyes.   
  
“Coach says the three of you need to break up or this won’t work,” Kunimi reads. His brow furrowed in petrified confusion, he reads it aloud again, this time in a dazed whisper.   
  
“Okay, then,” Kageyama says, almost in a chirp, “what about our captain?”


	3. Chapter 3

Little things bug Kunimi like nothing else now: people laughing and chewing with their mouths open, people looking at their phones while they’re having a conversation, people making plans and then cancelling them on the chosen day for flimsy reasons.

He realizes with a stunning pang in his head that those things aren’t minor by any degree of the imagination. And everyone on the volleyball team at this moment in time is guilty of them except for his boyfriends.

Which brings him to the current afternoon, him rigidly pressed against a steel blue row of lockers, his scrubbed black shoulder bag hanging just so down his arm. He scowls over his multilayered scifi novel (another loner from Akaashi) at Matsukawa, who’s laughing at something Hanamaki’s sent him on his phone. 

They’re always staring at their phones like idiots, barely holding a conversation before gravitating to something on their screens. Whenever Kindaichi tries to initiate some semblance of conversation, one of them nods and invariably ignores him. Kunimi’s fingers pressurize around the paperback covers of Akaashi’s book, the back cover now bent to a damaged degree. _ A worthy cause, _ Kunimi thinks, _ and Keiji would agree with me. _

Finally, Matsukawa’s eyes seize on him, big and unblinking.

“Okay, seriously, what’s up with you today?” Hanamaki says, folding his arms. “You’ve been acting like a bug bit you all the way up your ass.”

In spite of himself, Kunimi laughs, though the sound is deadened by harsh breathing. “You’re assuming that’s not the case.”

“All right, real talk.” Kunimi doesn’t miss Matsukawa slipping his pearl white phone in his shoulder bag before turning back to him. “What’s going on?”

Assembling the perfunctory words in his head, the beginning and end of all this unpleasantness, Kunimi breathes inwards.

What comes out spins any hope of damage control into a parallel universe: “Did one of you send Kindaichi that fucked up text message?”

Hanamaki bristles as if jolted by a vicious impact. “What the fuck?”

Matsukawa’s face darkens with an aggressive pretence of calm that twists Kunimi’s gut.

“If either of you sent that,” he says, “consider our friendship over.”

Hanamaki spits the words: “Our friendship’s dead yesterday if you’re gonna accuse us of petty shit.”

“So you _ do _know about it, then.”

Matsukawa sighs, toneless. “Yeah, we know it happened, but not because we sanctioned it.”

His anger, spiteful and vibrant, the forceful spark of a blowtorch, charges through him. Kunimi surrenders. That they had the balls to ask him what was wrong when they both knew full well what had happened. Some friends. He imagines them as they were on that day, probably slouching around in their gym gear as they are now, mindlessly sending each other irrelevant shit on their phones, laughing like idiots.

In another universe coexisting alongside their screened paradise, someone had sent that message. Kunimi’s head boils.

“If it helps,” Hanamaki says, cutting, “it was out of our control. Asshole.”

“Oh.” Kunimi smiles, its ugliness transfixing. “_I’m_ the asshole. Okay.”

Matsukawa shakes his head. “You’re _both_ the assholes right now.” He meets Kunimi’s gaze, and an unflinching weariness haunts him as he lowers his head. “If we told you three how it went down, you’d all short-circuit and probably lose it.”

Kunimi laughs, the sound a pained mockery of itself. “What you’re witnessing now is the closest you’ll get to me losing it. Hit me.”

“Not necessary.” 

As one, the three of them turn to Oikawa, himself barely suppressing a smile. Closing the door of the boy’s locker room with a quick switch of his wrist, he allows himself an indulgent smirk.

“I’m surprised my plan mostly paid off,” he says.

Kunimi regards their captain in full: the sharp glint of a brandished knifepoint twinkling in his eyes, the shrewd twitch of his damning mouth, one eyebrow inclined in mesmerizing thoughtfulness.

He thinks back to prior months, all the fights between their captain and Irihata surrounding a tremendous truth bigger than all of them, bigger than volleyball. How Iwaizumi, holding himself together with a daunting combination of magic and unfailing hope, had stuck by his side and reminded everyone, over and over again, that their sexual orientations and volleyball were mutually exclusive. They’d believed him, but watching Oikawa fight with himself had dragged them through their worst fears with the assurance that if they didn’t pull him out of his own, they’d fight right along with him.

It all culminates, then, in a stunning revelation, all of this history. Oikawa hadn’t gotten what he wanted by showing his truth and fucking the consequences. Naturally, he wouldn’t stand for his teammates doing the same with no cause for suffering.

“Wow,” Kunimi says, slowly blinking. “You really _ are _that mean.”

Shrugging, Oikawa bites his lip, one hip jutting out in a strangely artful arch.

“Volleyball’s a bloodsport.” 

In one motion, he lunges for Kunimi, swiping his lips across his ear. 

“Fight for your dreams, little one,” he whispers. 

His eyes rove with a cursory inspection over the book, now strangled in Kunimi’s hands. “Oh, fuck me. Fukuroudani’s setter’s still lending you books, I take it. Get over him.”

His anger, now a dull throb in his head, unravels, giving itself over to a sinking weight drowning in his stomach.

“What makes you think I’m in love with him?” Kunimi says.

Oikawa smiles. “I’m not gonna waste my time or yours by answering that question.” 

Glowering, Kunimi pushes past him, hard enough to smart, and shoulders his way out of the locker room. 

-

“So what if you wanna make sweet love to him? Everyone wants to bone Akaashi. Even Akaashi.”

Kindaichi’s softly trailing his fingers up Kunimi’s back, the both of them lying on Kunimi’s unmade bed, their homework forgotten on the baby blue rug. Kunimi snorts.

“I don’t ask him about his masturbating habits, you fucking perv.”

Kindaichi smiles. “But you want to. _ I _want you to.” 

He snuggles against the warmth of Kunimi’s back, snagging him around his bare waist with a greedy restlessness. Kunimi turns on his side, facing the window open on the dreaming nighttime breeze. Smothering himself against his neck, Kindaichi sighs into his skin.

“Yuutarou,” Kunimi says, low, “Oikawa-senpai sent that text.”

There’s a pause fit for hiding in, for cloaking yourself around and never quite leaving, forever suspending yourself in silence.

“I know.”

“Why did he do it?”

Untangling his arms from their embrace, Kindaichi stands himself on his elbow. Idly, Kunimi trails his fingertips up and over the thin black seam of his boxers.

“I think he wants us to hate each other. He wants us to hate each other more than our rival teams.”

“But why?”

Kindaichi kisses him slowly, his lips reacquainting themselves with Akira’s jawbone as he says, “So we know how they feel about us.”

“That’s so fucked up.”

“That’s volleyball.” Freezing, Kindaichi’s mouth opens on an O when Kunimi springs up on his knees.

“Let’s call Tobio.”


	4. Chapter 4

Iwaizumi picks up their coffee from a favorite Italian hole in the wall, dark alcoved ceilings showcasing moonbeams, melting overhead from dangling wires.

He recites his and Tooru’s orders with the breezed verbatim medicinal to all frequenters. Her thin dark brows inquiring, the barista shudders when his head violently swivels in the direction of the fluted glass panes fronting the shoppe’s antiquated entrance.

She says, “Something wrong?” Then she follows the trajectory of his stilled gaze, her mouth slowly gaping at the spectacle of two men, around her age, the both of them heinously attractive and furiously making out with no amount of care as to the voyeuristic tendencies on full display around them.

The young man edging his partner’s back against the glass, dark swaths of hair eclipsing moonstruck eyes behind thick curtains, exposing a paling forehead, drenched from the rainfall slamming the sidewalk in slanted torrents, shoves his middle finger at Iwaizumi with a pointed scowl. He goes right along kissing his partner, bracing their shoulders from the ferocious downpour. His finger remains defiant.

Smirking, Iwaizumi kneads his palm into his forehead. 

“Wow.”

Satisfied, Kunimi winks once before shutting his eyes on the scandalized tableau staged in front of him, suspended in a silence taut enough to snap.

“...that Akaashi?”

Squinting, Iwaizumi allows himself one cautious step forward with his sodden white tennis shoes. Framing the familiar characters on the back of the passionately disheveled blazer, shaping the cascading waves of softened dark curls, he nods.

“Yep. That’s him. Fuck me.”

Opting for the side entrance, reassuring the confused stragglers missing the morning rush that he’s sorry for sideswiping their upper-echelon-of-society finery, Iwaizumi shields his and Tooru’s beverages with the poor umbrella of his left arm, clothed by his overlaundered raincoat, the aquamarine now fading into flinty grey, Aobajousai characters scraped off, imprints in their wake. 

Keeping this mindfuck a secret from his partner of seven years might exercise the entirety of his stamina before he’s even worked up a decent sweat from the combination walk and jog home. Forget the five and a half flights of stairs leading to their apartment. 

He hadn’t offered an argument when Tooru had shared, offhandedly, whilst being roughly fucked against Iwaizumi’s bathroom sink no less, that he’d found them  _ great  _ digs in a slightly affluent district, right around the corner from their favorite coffee shoppe.

Tooru had neglected to mention said coffee shoppe was actually a good eight blocks’ journey by foot, and that the district wasn’t so much affluent as so painfully aware of Iwaizumi’s homegrown good-heartedness, everyone treated him with the same level of respect bestowed upon an undertaker or leather worker.   


It took no less than half the day and then an hour’s worth of meditating at night to reclaim his faith in himself, in his belief that money brought happiness only in relation to people other than yourself, and in his devotion to his boyfriend.

They’re about to celebrate their eight year anniversary, but somehow, the weight of the secret encases itself in a fortress around his throat. He barely manages to blurt out, “Got our coffee,” squeezing through the open door before negotiating with it to shut by way of his ass. He’ll get the damn thing fixed with their left-over share from rent.

Tooru, smiling sleepily, nudges his arms across the kotatsu wedged in the heart of their living room. Draped in a plaid woolen blanket, so thick the vaguest concepts of winter vanish the moment it enshrouds your body, he shuffles the remnants of their studying from the dark table, half-finished math problems and astronomy charts drifting to the star-splattered aquamarine carpet. 

Iwaizumi’s eyes wander thoughtfully to their bookshelves, observing them with a kind amusement from three corners of the room, tucked against the faded walls Tooru insisted on painting Prussian Blue. He studies the embossed records of constellations, opinions on the workings of their universe, a history of the metaverse; the neon blue shelf dedicated to extraterrestrial life, something Tooru will defend, sleepless and hysterical, to the end of his days, elicits a hearty chuckle. Sometimes he thinks Tooru believes in other forms of life more than himself. Almost.

Frowning, Tooru says, “Don’t hide from me, Hajime.”

He remembers, again, with a frightening longing, that he’s loved his boy for more than seven years. Of course Tooru understands the carefully measured smile, the exacting proportions of his artificial calm. A particular vacancy in his eyes, a blandness that precedes him. He shakes his head.

“I’m grappling with something not meant for my eyes.” Placing their espressos on the kotatsu’s shaky table, his eyes widen, transfixed, when Tooru snakes a choking grip around his wrist. 

“What happened?”

Anyone else, Iwaizumi knows, might tire of this, the constant asking after his well-being. But he’s all too aware that it comes from an overpowering gratitude, bonedeep and sacred enough to warrant a shrine in the bleeding tracery mapping out Tooru’s heart.

He says, “Stop thinking, babe. Wanna fuck you.”

It’s swift, quick as a comet pirouetting in the midst of a colossal meteor shower, but Iwaizumi doesn’t miss a faint imprint of disdain, the flash hollowing out the wonder in Tooru’s flickering eyes. They blacken before he can reform the memory. It’s too fucking much, how willing this boy is to give the entirety of himself over, in overwhelming bundles, arms outstretched.

“At least wait while I shower, won’t you.”

He slinks up from beneath the blanket, working up the drawstring of his plaid flannel pajamas into a tangled mess. Smacking him on the ass with a jagged grunt, Iwaizumi sinks the ridges of his fingers into the fractals of blues printed on the washed-out yellow fabric. Clawing his hand around Tooru’s stretched blue collar, he bites the words down the incline of his neck.

“Best not linger.”

Brushing the pads of his fingers along Iwaizumi’s shoulder, Tooru winks before deliberately strolling in a luxurious daze to their shower at the end of the darkening hallway.

“Fuck.”

Stabbing at his heels, Iwaizumi reckons a morning spent fucking might take their mind off of their team member’s indiscretion. That doesn’t shake a disturbing suspicion.

“Kunimi,” he says, scowling as he rounds the bathroom door, “you owe me big time.”

From the shower, a voice delightedly chortles, “I heard that.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the LLF Comment Project (including the LLF Comment Builder), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates responses, including:  
Short comments  
Long comments  
Questions  
“<3” as extra kudos  
Reader-reader interaction  
This author replies to comments.


End file.
